What CEO's get wrong about prototypes

amazingcto.com

1 point·matthewsinclair··4 comments

This is _such_ a good article -- although it's not _just_ CEOs that make this mistake!

I've used the "Icerberg Principle" to explain this kind of thing many times. And it's true not just for AI but for almost any kind of non-trivial, production-grade tech. The things under the water cannot be an afterthought; they're essential. The problem, however, is that people without what I call "sympathy for software" often fail to see this nuance and complexity.

As an engineer, it's no use lamenting this fact or expecting things to be any different, because they will _never_ change. Your job as a CTO ends up morphing into the "Chief Vocabulary Officer", where you need to communicate these complexities in ways that people _can_ understand.

It has some good points but it reads like it was written by AI. Only the typos and grammatical errors lead me to assume a human may have written it.

I don't know, it's hard to tell sometimes. I thought it was making some pretty reasonable points.

Not AI specific but Joel On Software covered a lot of the same material and thinking, written a lot better, about 20 years ago - but that is because this is an evergreen problem - getting leaders to understand that a prototype is just a test or a demo, no a path to the solution.

A previous company had a rule that all prototypes were built with the express intention of throwing them away - no prototype code could ever make its way to live.

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